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Sunday, 28 December 2014

Hendren Global Group Top Facts: What caused DPRK internet outage

After
the much-publicized cyberattack against Sony that had the rest of the world
blaming North Korea, and the US vowing for retaliation, another news has rocked
the IT world: North Korea's sudden absence from the Internet.

IT
experts noted last Monday that the already small Internet connection of North
Korea was lost and even the state news service, Korean Central News Agency, was
not able to publish any content on that day due to the 9-hour outage.

The Internet blackout came as North Korea's
role in a hacking attack against Sony Pictures is being widely discussed. The
said attack has affected the company adversely that it decided to cancel the
release of the controversial film regarding an assassination of DPRK's ruler
Kim Jong Un.

According
to Hendren Global Group Top Facts,
the cause of outage is still unknown though many are speculating that it might
be the retaliation of US government, or perhaps a mere technical glitch. Here
are some of the speculations that made the rounds online on what's causing the
clog in Pyongyang's Internet pipe:

US
government retaliation. The somewhat incidental timing of last week's outage
has consequently led many to assume that the US had a hand in causing it.
However, a key admin officer from the White House insisted that they are still
discussing the most appropriate way to respond to Pyongyang so it is unlikely
that they played a role in it.

It may
be recalled that US President Barack Obama has previously promised to respond
to the cyberattack made against Sony "in a place and time and manner that
we choose". But before we think that was a declaration of cyberwar, another
expert from Hendren Global Group Top Facts noted that US officials favor a
non-cyber response, seeing as cyberattacks are often "not worth the
risk".

After
all, they can always place North Korea on more economic sanctions.

China
flipped the switch. The only known Internet connection of North Korea runs via
China United Network Communications (Unicom) and though the US has reportedly
asked China to shut down routers and servers utilized by Pyongyang, it remains
to be confirmed if they actually complied.

Hackers.
A certain hacker group named Lizard Squad claimed on their Twitter account that
they caused North Korea to go #offline. Considering that North Korea has only a
small bandwidth, it is certainly plausible for even a few attackers to shut it
down by clogging it with bad traffic (dDOS).

Self-imposed
shutdown. Another possible explanation came from Cloudflare's chief executive
Matthew Prince: "I would have though North Korea decided to turn the
Internet off for some reason."

It
makes sense, for if that's true, it won't be the first time that a government
has shut down access to the Web to maintain tight control over the information
flow.

Hardware
issue or software bug. A researcher from Dyn Inc has put forth a benign cause:
a bug in the country's router or software. Doug Madory commented though that
North Korea's network is much too small so perhaps such an accidental blackout
for 9 hours is still just a small probability.